The American Empire: Before the Fall

By Jesse Benton

Big News! Last year, Campaign for Liberty commissioned Bruce Fein, president of the American Freedom Agenda and former Deputy Attorney General, to write a foreign policy book. We needed a hard core educational tool that we can circulate to show the absurdity of the warfare state from someone with rock-ribbed intellectual credentials.

The book is complete and is now in its final editing process! Campaign for Liberty will publish, print, and promote this book through our contacts and social networks and mount a major media campaign to make sure this work gets serious attention at a critical time.

For the first time, pasted below is an exclusive sneak peak for our members. I cannot wait to get this published!

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE: BEFORE THE FALL

by Bruce Fein

Chapter 1

The American Empire At Its Meridian

It is the best of times for the American Empire.

It is the worst of times for the American Republic.

President Barack Obama has embraced if not bettered the national security instruction of the Bush-Cheney duumvirate, confounding messianic expectations.

His Nobel Peace Prize address boasted of the American Empire’s six decades of policing the world, and of his unchecked power reminiscent of British Kings to commence war in ostensible defense of the United States or for professed humanitarian purposes on his say-so alone. The President spoke while he expanded United States wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan against adversaries unthreatening to United States sovereignty.

More than 100,000 American troops are fighting in Iraq while civil war or partition looms.

The post-9/11 perpetual and global war against international terrorism continues unabated. The United States claims unique legal power to violate the sovereignty of every foreign country in seeking to capture or kill an Al Qaeda suspect.

Now United States weapons, money, troops, military advisors, and professed nation-building bureaucrats are poised to intervene in Yemen in response to a foiled Christmas day attempt to blow up a commercial aircraft by a Nigerian Muslim youth who may have been radicalized there. The Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Joe Lieberman (Ind. Conn.), declares the incident an act of war that requires a military, not a law enforcement response. He advocates for the would-be bomber, 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutullab, to be regarded as a prisoner of war and prosecuted before a military commission. Somalia is next in the queue to be invaded by the American Empire because of the presence there of the Somali terrorist organization Al Shabab, which collaborates with Al Qaeda in Yemen.

Tiny Denmark, whose defense budget is a decimal point of the Pentagon’s, is less easily frightened. On January 1, 2010, a Somali Muslim attempted to assassinate artist Kurt Westergaard in revenge for a 2005 cartoon depicting the Prophet Mohammad as a terrorist. The cartoon had earlier provoked Muslim firebombing attacks on Danish diplomatic missions and three other radical Islamic plots to kill the Danish cartoonist. Denmark’s intelligence chief asserted the assassination incident was “terrorist related,” with a possible connection to Al Shabab. The Danish Prime Minister descried the terrorism as “an attack on our open society and our democracy.” Yet Denmark did not declare war on terrorism or against Al Shabab. It did not declare the would-be assassin a prisoner of war. It charged him with attempted murder subject to prosecution in civilian courts with customary due process protections. The American Empire would have characterized the crime as war, and the perpetrator as a warrior.

Stories featured in leading newspapers and broadcasts corroborate General Douglas MacArthur’s post-World War II observation: “Our economy is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and an incessant propaganda of fear.” Never has United States sovereignty been so invulnerable. Never has the United States been so frightened of foreign danger.

The Empire is electrified by a feeling of self-righteousness. President Dwight D. Eisenhower sermonized: “America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.”

The Founding Fathers would be shocked. They had constructed an American Republic that vehemently opposed crusades, constant warfare and virtual deification of the President. They had pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to defeat the British Empire, and to renounce entangling alliances as the bane of peace, checks and balances, limited government, and individual liberty. President Thomas Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address proclaimed: “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations-entangling alliances with none.” President Grover Cleveland elaborated on the foreign policy of the United States inherited from the Constitution’s makers:

It is the policy of peace suitable to our interests. It is the policy of neutrality; rejecting any share in foreign brawls and ambitions on other continents, and repelling their intrusion here. It is the policy of Monroe and of Washington and Jefferson: Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.

But the Founding Fathers’ handiwork has turned to ashes. The American Empire’s annual military budget exceeds $690 billion, greater than the yearly military expenditures of the next 25 countries combined. United States military spending climbs despite the disappearance of all foreign dangers to United States sovereignty.

I’m also proud to announce that Bruce Fein will be joining us at CPAC 2010 for a C4L-sponsored panel on why we need to oppose the War on Terror. It’s sure to be an exciting event!

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